NINE angles? In this economy??
Typically, it's not a good thing when my weird interests start making it into mainstream news coverage, and today brings us another example of that:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/23/army-attack-ethan-melzer-satanic/
For reasons even I struggle to understand, I have been interested in satanic cults for most of my life. As I got older and discovered that most satanists don't actually worship the devil or even belief in any non-materialist explanation of existence, I started to wonder: well, are there any actual devil worshipers out there?
The Church of Satan - carny atheists. The Temple of Set - edgy New Age types. The Temple of Satan - edgy Dawkins atheists. There are any number of splinter groups, from the Order of the Black Ram (LaVeyan racists) to the Satanic Reds (LaVeyan Marxists), none of whom actually believe in the devil. Was satanism just an excuse for adults to be goth without fear of getting de-pantsed at the bus stop by cruel teens?
The closest I could find to any group of people who actually seemed to believe in the devil and also want to be pals with him were the so-called "teenage dabblers," groups of 1980s heavy metal murks who would occasionally ingest huge enough quantities of a terrible drug to stab someone. These weren't really even "groups," let alone cults or sects or orders; they were just dumb kids playing with transgressive ideas. The absolute zenith of this was a grouplet of teenage dabblers in southern New Hampshire who sprayed the area with their sinister name, Satan Always Laughs At Damnation - SALAD.
The same pretty much goes for the Scandinavian "black metal" groups, who emerged in the 1990s and were celebrated in the global metal world for their profoundly unlistenable music and habit of burning medieval churches to the ground (less celebrated by the global metal world: the black metal bands' embrace of Nazism and their violent attacks on gay men, including one that ended in murder). These pale, frosty, deeply stupid young men were pioneers in what has become a booming niche of "am I or ain't I?" wink-wink transgression. Are they really satanists? Are they really Nazis? Is the lead singer of Abruptum really called "It" because, as the band's press releases claimed, he is "too evil for a human name"?
At some point in the 1990s, after absorbing that the black metal scene was composed entirely of poseurs and dopes, I stumbled at last on the real deal: the Order of Nine Angles.
A UK group with murky origins in the 1970s, they are, as their voluminous written output makes explicit, a no-bones-about-it group of literal devil worshipers: they believe in the reality of supernatural evil, and seek to aid it by committing, or by causing the commission of, any number of horrific acts ranging from rape to child molestation to murder. Whereas publicity-hungry edgelords like the Church of Satan and the Temple of Satan are quick to condemn the idea that satanism has anything to do with violence, the O9A has published multiple guides to carrying out human sacrifices, through a process they call "culling."
Here's where they differ from the Hollywood image of robed devil worshipers standing over a bloodstained altar in the woods: they recognize this is impractical behavior, certainly for any group whose members would prefer to stay out of prison. So instead, they focus their efforts on trying to find ways to subtly cause other people to carry out criminal activities.
Sort of the Trotskyists of the occult underground, they practice a version of entryism that they call "taking insight roles": infiltrating groups in hopes of steering those groups toward activities in line with O9A doctrine, e.g. murder. Starting in the late 1970s, they discovered that there are few groups with a social milieu more easily pointed toward mayhem than tiny neo-Nazi sects, and O9A members secretly joined everything from the British Movement to Combat 18, which is where the Nazi associations with the cult began.
Most infamously, it was the O9A-controlled National Socialist Movement in Britain that recruited a troubled loner named David Copleand, who in 1999 launched a bombing campaign against London's black, Asian, and gay communities, killing three people and injuring some 130 others, including people who lost limbs. Copeland's murders were claimed as sacrifices by the O9A in internal literature, although it also shined a light on the group for the first time, driving its members even further into hiding.
A few years later, some of them popped up again, this time in the unlikely guise of converts to Islam, writing treatises that justified suicide bombings and trying to infiltrate mosques in London and Paris. Just like with the Nazi beliefs, the support for Al Qaeda was a cover for the group's true beliefs: that by spreading misery and alarm, they were helping the supernatural embodiment of evil gain control of the world.
Members have always been secretive, even by the standards of "left-hand" occultist sects. Their huge corpus of literature was all produced under pseudonyms, and there was debate at one time about whether the group even existed (some scholars of "alternative religious movements" who came of age in the 1990s and early 2000s tended to argue there was no such thing; it was bad press for all the "good" satanists they championed), or, possibly, whether it was entirely the work of a single man: for a while, the gibe "Nine Angles, One Member" was popular in occult circles.
Social media's tendency toward extremism has been good for the group; no one argues whether they exist anymore. Their name has come up repeatedly in terrorism trials in the UK in the last two years, as the influence behind groups with names like National Action and the Sonnenkrieg Division; in the U.S., the group has been linked to the terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, which committed at least a dozen murders before a series of arrests this year seemed to drive it to ground, and to the South Carolina-based publishing house Temple Ov Blood, which espouses a bizarre ideology blending fascism, satanism, serial killer fandom, and support for the government of North Korea, and whose books you can buy on Amazon.
And now the latest: linked by the US Justice Department to a soldier's botched attempt to lead a terrorist attack on his own unit. It was a mild out-of-body experience to read the name of a group that had been a personal obsession for so long in the New York Times, although not really a pleasant one.
Anyway, it's easy to get worked up about this group because they're cartoonishly evil, but they're much less of a threat to the average American than, say, the police. Still, if the mainstream media needs to fill some time with a talking head commenting sagely on the New Occult Threat, I'm hoping they send me a DM.